They’re strawberries. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Best in show! My poem “Vita Sackville-West Wins the Golden Wedding Award at the Cummington Fair” won first prize in the 2024 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award for LGBTQ Poetry. You can read this poem and my finalist poem “Why the Sunrise Is Trans” in their online journal ArLiJo, Issue #201.

The Cummington Fair is a real event held the weekend before Labor Day in the Western Massachusetts town of Cummington, also home to the Cummington Creamery, I kid you not. It’s a great old-fashioned country fair with an amateur art exhibit, antique cars, midway rides, a petting zoo, and great Polish food. One year they had an acrobat who took breathtaking dives from a tall metal pole, telling the story of his sobriety journey between feats. Lest I be accused of smuttifying this family event, the Japanese dumpling vendors at the Nom Nom Hut this year had to wear shirts saying “Put our balls in your mouth”.

I wrote this poem after the 2023 fair, where they did hold a Golden Wedding Award contest for couples (presumably straight) married 50+ years. The country singer covering “Gentle on My Mind” was also real, though I can’t recall her band’s name. Around this time, my mom’s lesbian movie club was on a Bloomsbury Group kick. We saw the 2018 film “Vita and Virginia” followed by the 1990 miniseries “Portrait of a Marriage”, which was based on Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson’s book of the same name. For those who don’t know, chaotic bisexual novelist Vita was married to British diplomat and moderately discreet homosexual Harold Nicolson. Apparently they were deeply devoted to each other and found a way to express their sexual complexity while maintaining a strong partnership. I was yearning to make some space for this kind of marriage to be recognized as praiseworthy, or at least possible.

Vita Sackville-West Wins the Golden Wedding Award at the Cummington Fair

An optimistic alto covers Gentle on My Mind

in the bandshell by the chicken barn.
Her calves chunk-chunk in floral-stitched boots.
Is the idea of a woman less demanding than her pussy?
Twinned oxen yoked to concrete

blocks pull through dust
to cheers. Desire anything

because it’s in front of you,
soap, mortgages, and dyed quartz flowers
sold from white wooden stalls

at the bottom of the hill. Ideas don’t tire,
rub themselves to rash, or bleed like roast beef dinner
that’s promised as a prize over the loudspeaker

to the best couple fifty-plus years wed.
Man and woman is understood
by the burlap-faced leaders of the two-step, gently
resting their chins on their wives’ tucked curls.

Slow, slow. The alto swings
long molasses hair back from her cheeky face
singing that not-like-other-girls song.

The oxen win a ribbon. The boy who hits
the bell with the hammer wins a ticket to do it again.
His mother sticks her face into a cream puff
the way Vita would have

tongued Virginia Woolf’s cunt. To be pleasant
memory, to be covered in art,
don’t cry at leavings. Blame

is a trash barrel of single-use knives.
Ideas are insatiable. Vita and Harold died

one anniversary short of golden,
she with her tea cakes, he with his Persian boys.

And Virginia, when she weighed down her pockets
with tickets for the final carousel,

what vows held her up so long?